Courage

During Sex Week on TCN a few weeks ago, William Quincy Belle sent me a link to a piece he wrote on a book by Pamela Madsen; he actually said to me, “check out this woman’s personal journey.”  Here is his link.  http://wqebelle.blogspot.com/2011/05/book-review-shameless-by-pamela-madsen.html?zx=b101847a6fe42037

Well.  Oh My Holy God.

The book is actually called, Shameless:  How I ditched the diet, Got Naked, Found True Pleasure… and Somehow Got Home in Time to Cook Dinner.

I started it Saturday evening on the plane while jetting off to see my lovah and finished it Sunday afternoon while lazing on the sofa with him watching football.  To be honest, I got so hot and bothered at one point that he told me I was breathing hard and seemed ‘squirmy’, at which point I had to explain what I was reading.  Then we had to take a football and reading break for me to tear his clothes off. 

Bless his heart.

This is a true story of Pamela’s journey (at 43 years-old, 60 pounds overweight, happily married to her high school sweetheart for 25 years, and the mom of 2 boys) to spice up her life and find pleasure.  She says over and over in the book that she was happy in her sex life with her husband, but she also calls it vanilla a time or two, and didn’t want to have an affair.  And she doesn’t.   Instead she finds alternative ways beginning with “Sacred Intimates” and erotic massage which progresses throughout the book into women’s sex workshops and week long retreats in New Mexico where they all get naked and dance on rocks, fat and all.  Truly inner goddess business.   In the process of all of this rock frolicking she confronts a myriad of body image issues, self esteem crap and relationship truths. 

By the way, she is quite ordinary looking, this is truth after all,  not fiction.

Pamela Madsen

Pamela in a corset.

If she can do it, so can I!  I am getting myself a pair of those stockings!

Anyway…

I related to this book, I couldn’t put it down.

She talks of her friends and their relationships with their husbands and lovers  and feeling like she is missing something.  I myself have monthly wine dinners with my girlfriends where we gab about our lives, getting more personal with every drink, until someone starts crying and having a cathartic experience and we all get very introspective in a womanly, nurturing, boozy, existential sort of way. 

Nagging dissatisfaction, Pamela?  Yes, I’ve been there.

The main difference here is that her dissatisfaction was not with her husband.  She says repeatedly that she loves him and the life she has with him.  Me and Stanley?  Not so much.  She had to figure out a way to preserve that relationship while finding herself sexually.  I had to trash my relationship in order to find myself at all. 

This book is sexy.  It did make me squirm and blush.

This is 50 Shades for the more mature set. Pamela taking her sexuality into her own hands? That is much sexier to me than the 20 something Anastasia and the crazy Mr. Grey.

I highly recommend that women read this book.  But that said, I also have a few things I want to make clear that I had a few issues with.  First, the whole ‘erotic massage’ thing is basically having someone touch you until you have an orgasm without intercourse.  But you pay them and that is naughty.  William Quincy Belle brought that point to me and linked me to this piece he wrote:  http://open.salon.com/blog/wqbelle/2011/06/20/if_the_situation_had_been_reversed 

A woman doing this is ‘on a journey’ and appears liberated.  

Men who do the same are pervs.

Not his words exactly but the sentiment is closely the same.

I agree with him.  

But damn! I think this woman is so courageous.

The Cowardly Lion’s Courage Badge

And here is why:  women don’t pay for orgasms.  Maybe that is why we have so few of them.  But really, we don’t.  We aren’t that liberated yet.  The only woman I can think of that paid for it is Lauren Hutton in American Gigalo and it was a movie.  Lame.    I think by and large, that women take what we get sexually and spend a whole lot of time dissatisfied.  Maybe some have naughty little private lives and take lovers or self pleasure with toys when the kids are at school.  But I don’t think most women do much of that.  We are busy; we are working, cleaning, having to do school projects and laundry. Our own sexual pleasure goes to the bottom of the list.  

I listen to people for a living and they tell me all sorts of torrid things.  Things that sometimes haunt me and I wish they had kept to themselves even;  I have never had a woman say this sort of thing to me or admit to sexual needs.  On the other hand, I have had few male clients that didn’t disclose sexual content early on in therapy.  Men are more out there with their sexual needs.  Maybe women need to put it out there too.   The closest I have come to a woman disclosing sexual need is a psychotic patient in a hospital that was screaming from her room, “I NEED ME A MAN TO FUCK!”

(Honey, don’t we all)

That was brutally honest of her but she was in an active psychotic phase. 

Pamela Madsen is courageous.  She called erotic massage businesses and asked if they worked on women (it appears these places have a mostly male clientele who get a “Happy Ending”).  She  made appointments and she kept them.  She went into private apartments for her appointments with people she had never met.  She took off her clothes, while chubby, in front of strangers.  She went to one of those workshops  for sexual healing, BY HERSELF.  She TOLD her husband all of this and even her mother.  I could never tell my mother, people.  Then, she wrote it all up in a book and took her chubby ass on morning TV to talk about her journey and finding her inner goddess.  She has bigger cajones than I will ever have.

Of course she is not a Southern woman raised in the Bible Belt.

Still.  I never would have had the nerve.

Now I kind of want to go dance naked on the rocks in New Mexico and let my flab fly in the wind!

But I am way to scared to go alone! See? 

No nerve.

Cheers to Pamela Madsen. 

May we all find our inner goddess. Soonish.